A 1960s nuclear research lab in the North of England will host a new quantum computing facility under plans drawn up by a Silicon Valley technology company.
PsiQuantum is to set up a research hub at the Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire, using the facility’s state of the art cooling systems to develop its technology.
PsiQuantum, which is backed by BlackRock, Microsoft and Baillie Gifford, was set up by professors at the University of Bristol and Imperial College London but its founders moved to Silicon Valley in 2016 under advice from investors.
Among “the jobs once done by God [that] can be done by natural entities” there is life after death. Dawkins “frequently affirms that there is no life after death”, but Steinhart shows that this is inconsistent with Dawkins’ own convictions. Dawkins “should have argued that false religious theories of life after death can be replaced with more plausible scientific theories of life after death” [**].
Steinhart describes two plausible scientific theories of life after death: promotion to the higher level of reality of the simulators, and revisions of entire lives in new universes, each better than the previous life and universe. Worth noting, promotion could preserve memories and implement “the ancient idea of the resurrection of the body.” These theories of life after death are only sketched in this book, see Steinhart’s previous book “Your Digital Afterlives: Computational Theories of Life after Death” for more. See also my review of “Your Digital Afterlives” in “Tales of the Turing Church” (Chapter 12).
In summary, Steinhart builds a thorough and philosophically consistent spiritual naturalism, inspired by Dawkins, which offers the main mental benefits of religion. I like (actually I love) philosophy, but I try to keep mine as simple and working-class as possible, because many people don’t have the patience (or the time) for too much philosophical sophistication. I think the two approaches are complementary. So I use the term “religion” for the spiritual naturalism of Dawkins and Steinhart, and I use the simple term “God” now and then.
I’m quite happy with this resolution of the conflict between determinism and free will…
By ‘free will’ do you mean ability to make an utterly random decision? But what is ‘utterly random’? If something’s unpredictable, it’s all but indistinguishable from being random, no?
Computer scientist Amit Sahai, PhD, is asked to explain the concept of zero-knowledge proofs to 5 different people; a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student, and an expert. Using a variety of techniques, Amit breaks down what zero-knowledge proofs are and why it’s so exciting in the world of cryptography.
Amit Sahai, PhD, is a professor of computer science at UCLA Samueli School of Engineering.
Since the advent of quantum mechanics, the field of physics has been divided into two distinct areas: classical physics and quantum physics. Classical physics deals with the movements of everyday objects in the macroscopic world, while quantum physics explains the strange behaviors of tiny elementary particles in the microscopic world.
Many solids and liquids are made up of particles that interact with each other at close distances, leading to the creation of “quasiparticles.” Quasiparticles are stable excitations that act as weakly interacting particles. The concept of quasiparticles was introduced in 1941 by Soviet physicist Lev Landau and has since become a crucial tool in the study of quantum matter. Some well-known examples of quasiparticles include Bogoliubov quasiparticles in superconductivity, excitons in semiconductors.
Semiconductors are a type of material that has electrical conductivity between that of a conductor (such as copper) and an insulator (such as rubber). Semiconductors are used in a wide range of electronic devices, including transistors, diodes, solar cells, and integrated circuits. The electrical conductivity of a semiconductor can be controlled by adding impurities to the material through a process called doping. Silicon is the most widely used material for semiconductor devices, but other materials such as gallium arsenide and indium phosphide are also used in certain applications.
Recent advances in human stem cell-derived brain organoids promise to replicate critical molecular and cellular aspects of learning and memory and possibly aspects of cognition in vitro. Coining the term “organoid intelligence” (OI) to encompass these developments, we present a collaborative program to implement the vision of a multidisciplinary field of OI. This aims to establish OI as a form of genuine biological computing that harnesses brain organoids using scientific and bioengineering advances in an ethically responsible manner. Standardized, 3D, myelinated brain organoids can now be produced with high cell density and enriched levels of glial cells and gene expression critical for learning. Integrated microfluidic perfusion systems can support scalable and durable culturing, and spatiotemporal chemical signaling.
HRL Laboratories, LLC, has published the first demonstration of universal control of encoded spin qubits. This newly emerging approach to quantum computation uses a novel silicon-based qubit device architecture, fabricated in HRL’s Malibu cleanroom, to trap single electrons in quantum dots. Spins of three such single electrons host energy-degenerate qubit states, which are controlled by nearest-neighbor contact interactions that partially swap spin states with those of their neighbors.
Posted online ahead of publication in the journal Nature, the HRL experiment demonstrated universal control of their encoded qubits, which means the qubits can be used successfully for any kind of quantum computational algorithm implementation. The encoded silicon/silicon germanium quantum dot qubits use three electron spins and a control scheme whereby voltages applied to metal gates partially swap the directions of those electron-spins without ever aligning them in any particular direction. The demonstration involved applying thousands of these precisely calibrated voltage pulses in strict relation to one another over the course of a few millionths of a second. The article is entitled “Universal logic with encoded spin qubits in silicon.”
The quantum coherence offered by the isotopically enriched silicon used, the all-electrical and low-crosstalk-control of partial swap operations, and the configurable insensitivity of the encoding to certain error sources combine to offer a strong pathway toward scalable fault tolerance and computational advantage, major steps toward a commercial quantum computer.
“Data is the greatest currency created by the human race”.
Cloud computing startup Lonestar Data Holdings announced the results of its latest $5 million funding round, which will help it develop its technology for storing data on the lunar surface.
New lunar data centers will store humanity’s ‘greatest currency.’
LoneStar.
The Florida-based company aims to build lunar data centers on the Moon to help combat the environmental impact of large server centers on Earth. It could also help NASA in its bid to build a permanent colony on the Moon with its upcoming crewed Artemis missions.
Recently, Scientists have outlined a plan for a potentially revolutionary new area of research called “organoid intelligence”, which aims to create “biocomputers”, where brain cultures grown in the lab are coupled to real-world sensors and input/output devices.
Quantum bits inspired by Schrödinger’s cat could allow quantum computers to make fewer mistakes and more efficiently crack algorithms used for encryption.
